Origins and Names
Elendil was one of the Dúnedain, the Men of Númenor who traced their descent from the Edain of the First Age, and within that people he belonged to a house of particular standing. His father was Amandil, the last to hold the lordship of Andúnië on the western coast of the island, a title that had come down from Silmariën, daughter of the fourth ruler Tar-Elendil; her son Valandil was the first of that line. Because the sceptre passed by the male descent instead, the lords of Andúnië stood close in blood to the kings without any claim upon the crown, and they used what influence remained to them to shelter the party called the Faithful, who preserved friendship with the Eldar and reverence for the Valar at a time when both had become suspect in Armenelos. Amandil himself sat in the King's Council until the growing power of Sauron drove him from it, and the household withdrew eastward to Rómenna.
His name is Quenya, in keeping with the habit of the Faithful, who kept the Elven tongues in use when others of Númenor abandoned them. Its first element is taken as elen, 'star', and the ending -ndil denotes devoted and disinterested love, so that the name is read both as 'star-lover' and, by the same association that gave the Faithful their collective name Elendili, as 'Elf-friend'. He is most often distinguished as Elendil the Tall, a byname answering to a height reported as remarkable even among a tall people, preserved in a note on Númenórean linear measure. Gondorian tradition kept a further epithet, Voronda, 'the steadfast', which survived in the formal Quenya of a later oath sworn by a Steward. The names he gave his sons, Isildur and Anárion, are built on the Elvish words for moon and sun and belong to the same tradition of speech.
The books published in Tolkien's lifetime give a sparer account of the same descent. Appendix A sets him in the long line running back to Elros and among those Númenóreans who did not forsake the Elves, and it is from him that both northern and southern kingdoms afterwards reckoned their kings, so that the name functioned less as a personal one than as the mark of a lineage. On its sounding, the rules of Appendix E place the stress on the middle syllable, since the vowel there stands before the consonant group nd: e-LEN-dil.
History
Elendil's recorded life begins in earnest in the last decade of Númenor, when Sauron's counsel had turned Ar-Pharazôn against the Ban of the Valar and the Faithful at Rómenna lived under watch. When the King's great armament was being built for the assault on the West, Amandil resolved to sail into the forbidden sea himself in the hope that the Valar would hear a plea made in the manner of Eärendil, and he charged his son to make no such attempt but to make ready ships in the eastern haven, to load them quietly with such people, goods and heirlooms as could be trusted to the sea, and to wait. Amandil put out with three servants and was never heard of again. Elendil did as he was bidden, and when the fleet of Ar-Pharazôn passed westward out of sight the ships lying off Rómenna rode out the days that followed until the sea rose and the land went under. Nine vessels bearing Elendil, his sons and their households were carried east on the wind and the mounting wave and cast up on the shores of Middle-earth in the year 3319 of the Second Age.
The survivors did not come ashore together. Elendil's own ships were driven northward into the Gulf of Lune, within the realm of Gil-galad, who received him and gave him lands in Eriador; the ships of Isildur and Anárion were carried far south to the mouths of Anduin. From these two landfalls came the two kingdoms founded in the following year, 3320: Arnor in the north, whose chief city Elendil built at Annúminas beside Lake Nenuial, and Gondor in the south, where his sons raised Osgiliath upon the river with Minas Ithil and Minas Anor to guard it east and west. Elendil held the high kingship over both and dwelt in the north, while Isildur and Anárion ruled the southern realm together as his lieutenants and heirs. The formula of words he is said to have spoken as he stepped ashore — that he had come out of the Great Sea and would remain, he and his descendants, while the world lasted — was still being repeated at the crowning of his heir Aragorn more than three thousand years afterwards.
Among the things saved from the wreck were the seven seeing-stones, a gift of the Eldar long kept by his house, and these were now divided between the realms: three were set in the north, at Annúminas, at Amon Sûl, and in the tower of Elostirion in the hills west of the Shire, and four in the south, at Osgiliath, Minas Ithil, Minas Anor and Orthanc. The stone of Elostirion answered to no other and looked only over the sea, and Elendil is remembered as having gone there to gaze westward toward Tol Eressëa, which he could still see by that means though the way was closed to ships. A seedling of the White Tree of Númenor, rescued before the Downfall, was planted by Isildur in Minas Ithil. For rather more than a century after the founding the exiles were left in peace, while Sauron, who had survived the ruin of the island in spirit only, returned to Mordor and rebuilt his power there in secret.
War came in 3429, when Sauron struck without warning at Gondor, took Minas Ithil and burned the Tree there. Isildur got away down Anduin with his wife and sons and a shoot of the Tree and sailed to seek his father in the north, while Anárion held Osgiliath and for a time drove the enemy back to the mountains. In 3430 Elendil and Gil-galad bound their peoples together in the league remembered as the Last Alliance, and in the following year the two kings marched east to Imladris, where the host gathered and remained for some years. In 3434 the Alliance crossed the Misty Mountains and came down to Dagorlad before the Black Gate, where Sauron's army was defeated in a great battle; the host then entered Mordor and laid siege to Barad-dûr. The siege lasted seven years and cost many lives, among them Anárion, killed in 3440 by a stone cast from the tower.
Fate veiled — revealFate revealed — veil againThis passage gives away how it ends.
Fate
In 3441 Sauron came out at last, and the fighting ended in single combat on the slopes of Orodruin, of which Elrond, who was present as Gil-galad's herald, gave an account at his council in Rivendell an age later. Elendil and Gil-galad together brought Sauron down and both perished in doing so; Narsil snapped beneath Elendil as he fell. Isildur took up the hilt-shard of his father's sword and with it cut the Ruling Ring from Sauron's hand, and Sauron's spirit fled and his servants were scattered. The Second Age is reckoned to end with that year. The broken sword went north with Isildur and was afterwards kept as the chief heirloom of his line, while the high kingship he had held over both realms did not long survive him in practice.
One further act belongs to the aftermath. Before Isildur left the south for the last time he made a tomb for his father on the summit of a wooded hill in the range dividing Anórien from the vale of the Entwash, and set the black coffer there; the place was hallowed, and knowledge of what it held was afterwards kept as a secret passing only from ruler to heir in Gondor. It remained there until the Steward Cirion, wishing to give the whole region north of the White Mountains to the Éothéod, had the coffer removed to the Hallows of Minas Tirith and used the hill instead as the place where he and Eorl swore their alliance. The white gem that Elendil had worn bound to his brow, the Elendilmir, passed with the rest of his estate to Isildur and was lost with him in the Anduin two years later, so that the northern kingdom had to make a second in its likeness.
Role and Powers
Fate veiled — revealFate revealed — veil againThis passage gives away how it ends.
Fate
Within the legendarium Elendil functions less as a figure of action than as a point of reference, since the authority he established was constitutional rather than personal and outlasted him in forms he never exercised himself. He governed the two realms for a hundred and twenty-one years, from their founding to his death, and for that period the high kingship was a working office only because one man held it; no later ruler administered both kingdoms in practice, and the northern and southern lines afterwards derived their right separately from the same source. The visible token of that right in the North was not a crown but a sceptre, the rod formerly carried by the lords of Andúnië, which Appendix A describes as the oldest work of human hands still preserved in Middle-earth.
His capacities were those of a Númenórean of the older stock, extended in degree rather than different in kind: unusual stature, a life measured in centuries, the seamanship that brought nine ships through the ruin of the island, and the command of learning that his house had kept when others let it fall. Nothing in the texts credits him with power of another order. He worked no enchantment, held no Ring, and is characterised by steadfastness and judgement rather than by any gift withheld from other Men. The measure of the limit is the end before Barad-dûr, where the overthrow of Sauron required the joint effort of the foremost lords of Elves and Men, cost both their lives, left the sword broken under its bearer, and diminished the enemy without ending him.
The one instrument that answered particularly to him was the set of seeing-stones, which in the later commentary are treated as property of the crown, their use reserved to the king and to wardens he appointed, so that a claim upon a Stone rested on inheritance as much as on ability. Handling one demanded a trained and unyielding will, and the stone set at Osgiliath held a governing position among the rest. Even so, their function was limited to sight and, between two minds willing it, the passage of thought; they conferred no power over anything they showed. What their later history in Gondor and at Orthanc demonstrates is that the arrangement depended on the discipline and legitimacy of the user, and that in weaker or unauthorised hands the same objects became a liability.
Kin, Allies, and Adversaries
The sources describe Elendil's family upward and downward but leave the middle blank: the mother of his sons is nowhere named, and his household enters the narrative only as a following. What binds the generations instead is a habit of charge and obedience. Amandil laid one task upon him and forbade him another, and he kept to both, though the keeping cost him his father; the same expectation passed to his own sons, who administered the southern realm as his deputies for more than a century with no quarrel recorded between them or with him. The line was also careful to secure itself against loss: Isildur's youngest son Valandil was born at Imladris while the host mustered there and was left behind when it marched, and Anárion's son Meneldil remained in the south, so that when the two older generations were spent each kingdom still had an heir at hand.
The association with Gil-galad is set out as a partnership of equals rather than a subordination of one people to the other; the two realms remained distinct, and neither king is shown commanding the other. Elrond, who served as Gil-galad's herald, is the chief witness to it, and he was also a kinsman at a great remove, since his brother Elros stood at the head of the line from which Elendil's house descended. Friendship with the Eldar was therefore genealogical as well as devotional. Elrond's later account treats that league as the last of its kind, assembled at a strength not seen since and still insufficient to its purpose.
His enmity with Sauron was inherited before it was ever fought out. Sauron had entered Númenor a captive and ended as the king's counsellor, had turned the island against the Valar, and had made the Faithful suspect in their own country, and both Amandil's disappearance and the ruin of the land followed from that ascendancy. Yet Elendil is nowhere shown in revolt against Ar-Pharazôn: he made ready and waited, and departed without striking at the crown. Among the Men of Middle-earth his standing likewise rested on earlier settlement rather than conquest, since the Faithful had held Pelargir on Anduin for centuries before the exiles arrived.
Drafts and Variants
The name and the figure both predate the kingdoms in exile. Elendil first carries weight in the abandoned time-travel story of the mid-1930s, where Tolkien built a chain of fathers and sons whose names translate one another across the ages: Alboin and Audoin Errol in the modern frame, Ælfwine and Eadwine in Anglo-Saxon England, and, at the far end of the descent, Elendil and Herendil in Númenor. In that setting Elendil is a lord of the Faithful under the king whose Quenya name was then Tar-kalion, and the surviving chapters show him arguing with a son drawn toward the king's party rather than commanding ships or founding realms; Isildur and Anárion have no place in the conception. The name accordingly works there as a straight equivalent of Ælfwine, 'Elf-friend', without the star-element reading later admitted beside it, and the associated sketches of the Downfall are far briefer than the account eventually published.
When Tolkien returned to the same frame in the 1940s, the Númenórean matter was recast as a Mannish tradition in which the Elves are largely absent, and there the house appears under Adûnaic rather than Quenya names, Elendil as Nimruzîr and his father as Aphanuzîr; the associated club-room narrative supplies the fragments of that language in which the names are embedded. Later still, a detailed regnal chronology compiled while the Appendices were being assembled gives dates that the published tables omit, including a birth year for Elendil in the thirty-second century of the Second Age and separate years for the births of his sons, so that his age at the end of the Alliance can be reckoned exactly. Much of that material was compressed or dropped before publication, and it is not always consistent with the shorter notices that survived into the finished book.
Adaptations
In Peter Jackson's trilogy Elendil is a silent-scale presence rather than a role: he is played by Peter McKenzie and appears only in the prologue sequence of the first film, where the alliance of Elves and Men is compressed into a single engagement on the plain below Mount Doom. The treatment departs from the appendices at several points. There is no seven-year siege of the Dark Tower and no death of Anárion beforehand; Sauron enters the fighting in person as a towering armoured figure and strikes Elendil down without opposition from Gil-galad, who is shown at the muster but takes no part in the enemy's overthrow. Narsil is broken by Sauron rather than beneath its falling bearer, and Isildur, taking up the remaining shard from the ground, severs the Ring in what the film presents as an improvised act of desperation. The film also treats the loss of the Ring as the destruction of Sauron's body outright.